1. Short Run, Seattle's first small-press expo in ages, was a whole lot of fun. Tons of people packed into the Vera Project to find over fifty exhibitors selling books, comics, and magazines. Exhibitors included Ong Ong, Hoarse, Margaret Ashford-Trotter, Third Place Press, Microcosm Publishing, Roberta Gregory, Sparkplug Comics, and many more. Lovers of the book as object who didn't attend Short Run missed out. These tables full of adorable, tiny bound books, and large scroll-comics, and folded, stitched zines whose shape affected the shape of the stories inside all proved that the book as a piece of technology still has a lot of room for innovation left inside of it. I can't imagine there won't be a second Short Run next year; there was such an air of destination at this show—finally, someone finally managed to put this together, and it's just as good as we always knew it would be—that you can't help but see it as the debut of a great new Seattle institution.

2. You'd be better off watching the trailer for The Immortals—or, better yet, reading Lindy West's review of the trailer for The Immortals—than actually watching The Immortals. I went to a matinee at the Cinerama just because I was curious about what director Tarsem would do with a disgustingly large budget and 3D technology, and I came away disappointed on every front. The story was awful, and not one actor did more than a competent job (I'm now officially worried about Henry Cavill as Superman in the upcoming Man of Steel movie; he looks the part, but he doesn't have any gravitas or moral weight). But you don't go to a Tarsem movie for the plot. You go because he brings an astonishing visual sensibility to the movie—The Fall, for example, is not a good movie, but it's a beautiful movie. Unfortunately, he fails to bring anything unique or especially beautiful to Immortals. All the eye-battering moments of beauty are in the trailer. The costumes feel overdone and hammy, instead of ornate and artful. It's a bunch of ridiculous moments chasing each other around, amounting to absolutely nothing. Only in a couple of quiet moments—especially a pair of silhouettes standing before a pastel sunset over a calm sea, which for a split-second transformed the Cinerama's huge screen into a window on another, more peaceful world—does the movie transfix or transport you. The rest of it is a terribly bland stew.